Learn more about the plenary speakers:

Harry R. Büller, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Internal Medicine, specialized in Vascular Medicine at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Büller earned his M.D. and Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam. After graduating, he completed his research fellowship in hemostasis and thrombosis in the Departments of Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1981 – 1982. He has authored and coauthored more than 740 scientific articles concerning topics in his field (H-index 101). He has been Co-Chairman for the Amsterdam Institute for Cardiovascular Research and is Chairman of the Vascular Medicine Working Group. He is a reviewer for The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Archives of Internal Medicine, and European Journal of Clinical Investigation, among others. He is a past member of the editorial Board of The Annals of Internal Medicine.​Büller was Chairman of the chapter Chest Antithrombotic therapy for venous thromboembolic disease of the Seventh ACCP Conference on Antithrombotic and Thrombolytic Therapy, 2004. Büller is the recipient of the Established Investigator Award presented by the Dutch Heart Foundation (1993 – 1998) and received the Dutch Society for Vascular Medicine 2005 Award. Since 2008 he is Honorary Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.​​

Peter Carmeliet, M.D., Ph.D., is head of the Laboratory of Angiogenesis and Vascular Metabolism and former director of the VIB — Vesalius Research Center, at the University of Leuven in Belgium. He graduated as Doctor in Medicine in 1984, and completed his Ph.D. in 1989, and performed a postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute, MIT in Cambridge USA. After his return to Leuven in 1992, Dr. Carmeliet started his own research group with a focus on how blood vessels grow (angiogenesis) in health and disease.

Carmeliet has published over 600 articles (>64.600 citations, h-index: 120). His achievements have been recognized by several honors and awards. The Carmeliet lab is currently studying how endothelial cells change their metabolism during vascular branching and exploring the therapeutic potential of targeting endothelial metabolism for anti-angiogenic strategies. The role of several key metabolic targets in endothelial cell biology and angiogenesis in vivo is under investigation.

Karin Hoffmeister​United StatesBlood Research Institute, BloodCenter of of Wisconsin

Karin Hoffmeister, M.D., is a Senior Investigator at Blood Research Institute, BloodCenter of Wisconsin. She was born in Rutenau, Poland and moved at the age of 13 to Germany where she started to understand the endless possibilities of sciences and to develop profound enthusiasm for medical sciences. She earned her M.D. at the Technical University, Aachen, Germany and worked as a clinical cardiologist at the University Hospital in Aachen for five years. After finishing her fellowship in cardiology, she decided to pursue a career as a principal investigator in platelet biology and moved to Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA.

At Harvard, Hoffmeister developed a deep interest in hematopoiesis and glycobiology and has been awarded the prestigious PEW scholarship in platelet glycobiology, which is awarded to a handful of the most promising young scientists in America and the Program of Excellence in Glycobiology and Hematology. She published in multiple prestigious journals such as Cell, Science and Nature and Blood. Her most recent findings unraveled a long-standing mystery of thrombopoietin regulation by hepatocytes. The results demonstrated that aged platelets bind to the hepatocyte specific Ashwell Morell receptor to increase thrombopoietin and platelet production. These results were published in Nature Medicine. Her unpublished data suggest a novel existence of continuous communication between platelets and liver cells, beyond thrombopoietin. She collaborates with hematologists and glycobiologists world-wide to understand the role of glycans in hematopoiesis. Currently, she is developing a program which investigates hematopoietic and immunologic disorders and transplantion medicine in context with systems glycobiology. Hoffmeister resides in Brookfield, Wisconsin, USA with her family and pets.

Sean Morrison, Ph.D., is the Director of the Children's Research Institute, Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics and the Katharyne and Gene Bishop Distinguished Chair in Pediatric Research at the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center. The Morrison laboratory studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms that regulate stem cell function in the nervous and hematopoietic systems and the role these mechanisms play in cancer.

Morrison obtained his B.Sc. in biology and chemistry from Dalhousie University (1991), then completed a Ph.D. in immunology at Stanford University (1996), and a postdoctoral fellowship in neurobiology at Caltech (1999). Morrison is currently at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center where he is the founding Director of Children’s Research Institute, which performs research at the interface of stem cell biology, cancer, and metabolism. Morrison was a Searle Scholar (2000-2003), was named to Technology Review Magazine’s list of 100 young innovators (2002), received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2003), the International Society for Hematology and Stem Cell’s McCulloch and Till Award (2007) the American Association of Anatomists Harland Mossman Award (2008), and a MERIT Award from the National Institute on Aging. Morrison has also been active in public policy issues surrounding stem cell research, recently serving as the President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

Willem H Ouwehand, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Experimental Haematology at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He obtained his medical degree and science Ph.D. in 1984 at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He also holds honorary Consultant Haematologist appointments at Cambridge University Hospitals and NHS Blood and Transplant. Ouwehand has also been honoured with the distinction of Fellow of the Royal College of Pathology and as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

He leads a research group of more than 80 staff, which specialise in studies on the formation and function of platelets with a focus on their role in heart attacks and stroke, respectively. Eight team leaders direct research in epigenomics of megakaryopoiesis, blood cell function, megakaryocyte & platelet biology and clinical bioinformatics & statistical genomics.

Ouwehand is also Director of the NIHR BioResource – Rare Diseases and oversees in this role a team of 35 staff. The NIHR BioResource is responsible for the Rare Diseases pilot phase of the 100 000 Genomes Project. Genotyping by Whole Genome Sequencing of 15,000 patients with the purpose to better define the molecular mechanisms underlying their disorders. Ouwehand lives in London and Cambridge and is married with two daughters.​

Wolfram Ruf, M.D., holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship and is the Scientific Director of the Center for Thrombosis and Hemostasis, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and is Professor of Immunology and Microbiology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, U.S.A..

Ruf studies the tissue factor (TF) initiated coagulation pathway and the interplay between coagulation and inflammation in cancer, metabolism and vascular diseases. His current translation research program is focused on cellular regulation of TF and extravascular signaling roles of coagulation proteases, co-receptors and protease activated receptors (PARs) in genetic mouse models of human diseases. ​

Marijke van den Berg​The NetherlandsUniversity Hospital Utrecht

Marijke van den Berg, M.D., Ph.D., attended the Faculty of Medicine, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She received her degree as a medical doctor in 1980. She worked for 3 years in Internal Medicine and Hematology. She defended her PhD thesis on Non-Hodgkin Lymphomas in March 1986. Meanwhile, she was trained as pediatrician and specialized in Pediatric-Hematology/Oncology in the VU Medical Center.

From 1991 to 2008 van den Berg worked in the University Hospital Utrecht as the Director of the Van Creveldkliniek, the Dutch National Center for Hemophilia, and at the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital Department of Pediatric Hematology. She did a sabbatical with Gilbert White in Chapel Hill (USA) on the relation of HLA type and inhibitor development.

Since 2008 she is clinical expert for the Blood Product Working Party of the European Medicine Agency (EMA). Between 2008 and 2011 she was CEO of the Meander Medical Center, a large teaching hospital. Since 2012, van den Berg holds a position as Associate Professor at the Department of Health Sciences and Epidemiology of the University Medical Center of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

​In May 2014 she was elected for four years as the Vice-President Medical of the World Federation of Hemophilia. Her expertise in hemophilia is in inhibitor development and prophylaxis. She is the initiator and principal investigator of several multicenter studies on inhibitors. ​​

​Steve Watson​United KingdomUniversity of Birmingham

Steve Watson, Ph.D., trained in Pharmacology in the University of Leeds before undertaking a Ph.D. in Cambridge. He was first exposed to platelet research with Eduardo Lapetina in Burroughs Wellcome in North Carolina in the early 1980s. During this time, he showed a critical role for IP3 and protein kinase C in platelet activation by a range of stimuli including collagen.

​Later, working in the Department of Pharmacology in the University of Oxford, he demonstrated that collagen activates platelets through the GPVI-FcR g-chain complex and mapped many of the proteins in the signalling pathway.

​In 2004, he took up the post of British Heart Foundation Chair in Cardiovascular Sciences and Cellular Pharmacology in the University of Birmingham. He has been the editor of nine journals, and is currently editor-in-chief of Platelets with Paul Harrison. Watson is currently a member of the ISTH Council. ​